Agathe Béraud, Training Coordinator at Gerflor, tells us that Alex “replaces all our PDFs, Word files and Excel sheets with one visual dashboard that brings team leaders, supervisors, unit managers and support departments onto the same training platform.” With this real‑time view, she says, Gerflor can truly pilot employee development inside its flooring factories, accelerate upskilling and turn a paper‑heavy process into a “huge time‑saver.”
Can you introduce yourself?
“My name is Agathe Béraud, I’m a training coordinator at the Tarare production site, the company I work for is called Gerflor. It’s a flooring company, best known through the Olympic Games because we supply the floors for the Games. In fact, we supplied the floors for the 2024 Olympic Games. In France, Gerflor mainly has two production sites, one based in Tarare, in the Rhône, and another based in Saint‑Paul‑Trois‑Châteaux.
My role in the company as training coordinator is to guarantee the compliance of the skills process linked to the skills framework, and also to help users, the workforce, to build employees’ skills via internal training courses, which I sometimes lead myself, and to see with the trainers how we can help employees develop their skills faster.”
How is Alex helpful to you?
“The main goal was precisely to digitise our skills framework, so we turned to Alex tool to really offer our users a less manual way of managing their skills because paper is fine, but for tracking it’s a real headache, and we really needed, once we’d built it, to be able to track it and manage it much more easily than was before.”
How many skills and workers do you have?
“I’ve forgotten the exact number, but it’s really a lot of skills; I think we have something like 18,000 skills in total across the Tarare and Provence scope, and I’ve only been talking about the Tarare scope. I think we have roughly between 4,500 and 5,000 employees, something like that.”
How was it before Alex?
“We had many, many, many PDF files, lots of Word documents we had carefully drafted by hand, and we also had many Excel files that allowed us to store the information visually, so we still had this very visual approach to skills and versatility, but updating and tracking was extremely complex, because there was a variety of formats and also a variety of places where those files were stored.”
Who uses Alex at Gerflor?
“Before Alex, it was mainly the team leaders, and with Alex today we’re slowly trying to train the support services, that is, the team leaders use the tool as they used to on paper, and we’re also trying to involve the other information channels, namely what we call supervisors, who are the N+1 of the team leaders, the unit managers, who are the N+2 of the team leaders, and then all the support services, that is, the Quality department, the HSE department, even Training, the HR department; we’ve really tried to ensure that all the stakeholders in training could come together around the same tool.”
How did you find out about Alex?
“We carried out a study and really tried to find a supplier who could really meet our visual requirements; that’s really what we were looking for above all. It was the training manager who came across the website, I suppose, who gave us a proposal and in fact what immediately caught our eye was really the skill matrix, because it was an exact replica of what we were doing today on the field.”
What’s the best thing about Alex?
“It’s going to be everything to do with data extraction and data analysis, which until today we were doing manually; it was very hands‑on: we’d put on our safety shoes, our yellow vests and go out onto the shop floor, open binders and literally write down in a file what we read and it was just time‑consuming. Now being able to generate data in a tool and just click a button to extract them and analyse them in no time at all, it’s a huge time saver, and I think that’s really where we’ll be able to manage all our training actions, whereas before, tracking was more complex.”
We would like to thank Agathe, and the whole team at Gerflor for all of the feedback that helps us continuously improve Alex!
If you would like to know more, book a free demo here!
You can also follow our news on social media :